Joule Thief

[nievesoliveras]

Congratulations @pirate for your success!!!

Jesus

[WilbyInebriated]

@ Pirate88179

C or D cell will last longer. The transistor is problem with increasing power. Heat sink needs to cool the transistor chip which means it has to make contact with the silicon chip that transistor is made of. This is not possible in plastic case. Heat sinking plastic case will not help cool chip because plastic is a poor heat conductor. Cooling plastic case may help a little but not much. In plastic case most of heat is conducted away by the collector lead which does connect to the transistor chip.

while i agree that plastic is not as good of a heat conductor as a metal tab, you can heatsink them as was mentioned earlier.
see stifflers thread http://www.overunity.com/index.php?topic=3457.msg111237#msg111237
here in these pictures you can see the copper tube. you can see it in several of the doc's pictures as well. it does indeed work.

[xee2]

@ all

It seems that the schematic of Fuji camera on the Jose Pino web page is not correct. Pin 1 of transformer does not seem to connect to neon bulb. The following appears to be the actual circuit I have. Pin 1 is connected to shutter switch or second transformer.

[Mk1]

I am about to modify my fiji board but one question first, why don't we use the high voltage coil, would it not be preferable to have the highest voltage spike. Ok it only has a switch on it but if it had a 555 or relay switch could we not get higher voltage and more control on frequency of the pulse ?

[WilbyInebriated]

I am about to modify my fiji board but one question first, why don't we use the high voltage coil, would it not be preferable to have the highest voltage spike. Ok it only has a switch on it but if it had a 555 or relay switch could we not get higher voltage and more control on frequency of the pulse ?

are you referring to the trigger coil when you say high voltage coil?
the transformer steps up the 1.5 volts from the battery to +300 volts or so. the trigger coil then steps this up to 2000 volts or so to slap the xenon with and make it flash while the +300 volts from the capacitor is across its electrodes. so the transformer is a larger step up than the trigger coil is. hope that helps.

i played around with the trigger coil added to the circuit. i never found a configuration where it made an impressionable difference. i'm sure i didn't cover all the bases, so don't take this as discouragement to try.

i found that when running it off a single wire, adding a aluminum coupling plate like in the stiffler thread did increase brightness.

@all
if you wanna run fluoros for peanuts, replicate stifflers SEC.